international conferences

The academic job market is famously difficult to navigate. Ironically, the decrease in job opportunities has prompted an increase in the number of materials required by each application—cover letters, CVs, recommendations, dissertation abstracts, research statements, teaching statements, diversity statements—all of which must be customized for each institution to which a candidate is applying. Yet, in spite of these challenges, there are still job openings each year and there are still success stories of people being hired for these positions. While no longer a guarantee, the only way to attain a full-time position in academia is to apply for one.

Classroom spaces and working environments speak volumes about how institutions conceive of teaching, learning and research, and whether they invest in collaboration. In many ways, institutions remain fixated on the front of the classroom, on the teacher as the “sage on the stage” rather than having faculty experts serve as “guides on the side,” “advanced organizers,” and “resources” for helping students foster their own learning. Individual offices silo faculty from one another, while graduate student and adjunct offices often offer fewer desks than bodies that use them. This long-held standard is changing somewhat, but slowly.

Second Call for Papers and Panel Proposals for the 2017 International Yeats Society Conference

October 20-22, 2017

New York City

Hosted and sponsored by:

The New School University * Fordham University * New York University/Glucksman Ireland House * Williams College

The conference includes keynote addresses by Maureen Murphy (Professor Emerita, Hofstra University), and Christopher Cahill (Director, American Irish Historical Society and Director, McCabe Fellowship Exchange Program, John Jay College of Criminal Justice), as well as a reading by the Irish poet Joan McBreen. 

One-Day Symposium. The Open University, Camden, London. Friday 20th October 2017

In the last decade an emerging generation of writers from Malaysia and Singapore has achieved international recognition, pioneering new global English fiction and embarking on more confident imaginative journeys across South East Asia. This one-day symposium, a collaboration between the Open University and the University of Exeter, seeks to remap global English fiction (dominated by neighbouring South Asia) and draw fresh attention to the dynamic colonial literary cultures and postcolonial, globalising futures of Malaysian and Singaporean Anglophone writing.

Over a quarter of a century ago, Linda Williams’ groundbreaking “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” was published in Film Quarterly. Her seminal article not only brought together distinct areas of film studies (genre criticism, spectatorial response, taste cultures, gender and sexuality, emotion and sensation in cinema) that are still highly relevant today, but also theoretical frameworks that have traditionally been kept separate. Although grounded in a psychoanalytic model for understanding structures of desire, fantasy, and identification, Williams’ essay at the same time marked a turning point towards a corpus of scholarship that is more attuned to and engaged with the embodied film-viewing experience.